What Would the World be like if We Left it to Itself?

Freedom regained …

... The overgrown ruins of a solitary confinement block in St Joseph Island, off the French Guiana. Photograph: Andres Leighton/PA

Perhaps what the environmentalist movement needs is a little less finger-wagging, and a few more appeals to the imagination. This occurred to me watching Alan Weisman mesmerize a few hundred Hay-goers by talking about his book, The World Without Us, a thought-experiment in which all humans vanish. And nature takes over. It wouldn't take her long to start some foreclosures, too. New York City's streets would collapse into the subways below after just twenty years, once the 850 pumps which keep the East and Hudson Rivers from rushing into Gotham's underground stop working.

Houses would be eaten by termites. Trees would start growing on our bridges, pushing the steel girders apart with their roots. A forest would reclaim Manhattan. Weisman is unequivocal about this. It's not a question of if, but when. There are a few things that'll take a while to digest, however. Plastic, which has drifted out to the ocean and been bashed to tiny bits by waves, is now being ingested by plankton. Scientists have no idea what this will mean.

And nuclear plants, once abandoned, would eventually go into meltdown. It's not clear how long it would take for nature to recover from the resulting simultaneous worldwide nuclear holocaust. By now, we've all seen the graphs, the predictions, paid the risingpetrol prices. Yet maybe what we need is a big reminder of the fact that our time here is not infinite. "Every organism which has overtaxed its resources has suffered a population crash," Weisman warned. "And it's not pretty."

It's an eerie exercise, this book - because it forces you to realize that nature has been tolerating us for quite some time, as we've used up more and more of the earth and its organisms. And one day it's going to bite back. In this sense, The World Without Us hasthe lurking menace of the opening moments of Twenty-Eight Days Later - it's a horror film waiting to happen.

And I couldn't help thinking, up there, on the stage with his professorial voice and bushy eyebrows, there's the guy calling to us from the audience - don't go into the next room, its dangerous!

[Duchess Note - Many thanks to Josee in sharing the above article.]